§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

European Socialist Citizens Of The World Reject Comrade Obama’s Criticism

Floundering desperately for someone else to add to the George W. Bush list of scapegoats to account for his devastating ignorance of economics and business, Comrade Obama has attacked the entire European Union.

Green Companies Are Not Evergreens

Liberal-progressives’ track record of picking useful and viable outlets for their socialistic industrial policy is a disaster, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s TVA in the New Deal. TVA has never paid for itself and continues to exist only with government subsidies. Yet private electrical utility companies serving all adjacent areas do as good or better job for their customers and do it profitably.

The explanation is that liberal-progressivism aims for “social democracy,” a theoretical, fairy-tale political state in which private business is regulated and administered by bureaucrats. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are recent prominent examples.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Pump-Priming Futility

All of Obama’s economic stimulus endeavors - the $800 billion 2009 stimulus, mortgage refinancing, home buyer credits, cash-for-clunkers, and his current so-called jobs creation program - are just one-shot dribs and drabs of the sort that failed for President Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression. The metaphor then was pump-priming: the concept that dumping a bit of water into the pump and exercising the pump handle would restart the economy and end the Depression. None of it worked.

In Paul Krugman’s terminology, the economy failed to gain traction. High unemployment stretched out for 12 dispiriting years. We are now traveling the same path for the same reasons.

Stimulus and the Depression: The Untold StoryThe U.S. doesn’t need another war to revive the economy. We need a policy turnaround like the one in the late 1930s.

By HAROLD L. COLE AND LEE E. OHANIAN

About one-half of President Obama’s proposed $447 billion American Jobs Act consists of payroll tax holidays designed to boost spending and increase hiring. But these temporary policies will do little to jump-start the economy, much as earlier temporary economic Band-Aids, such as the 2009 stimulus, did little to improve the economy.

Proponents justify stimulus spending in part based on the widely held view that government-fueled increases in “aggregate demand” during FDR’s New Deal ended the Great Depression and brought recovery. Christina Romer, former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has argued in op-eds that government should continue to spend for this reason. And in a 2002 speech as a Federal Reserve governor, current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed that monetary expansion and the turnaround from the deflation of 1932 to inflation in 1934 was a key reason that output expanded.

But boosting aggregate demand did not end the Great Depression. After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board’s Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression’s trough of July 1932 and June 1933. This was a period of significant deflation. Inflation began after June 1933, following the demise of the gold standard. Despite higher aggregate demand, industrial production was roughly flat over the following year.

The growth that followed the low point of the Depression was primarily due to productivity.

Productivity is considered a supply-side factor by many economists: It is determined by the technology and regulatory structure of the economy and therefore is largely independent of spending policies.

The growth rate of real per capita output is the sum of the growth rate of per capita labor input and productivity growth. Increasing aggregate demand is supposed to increase output growth by increasing labor input. But between 1932 and 1934, the period that Mr. Bernanke cited in his speech, per capita real gross domestic product (GDP) growth was entirely due to productivity growth, as per capita total hours worked

Greenhouse-Gas-Climatology Is Not Science

Writing in an op-ed article on the Wall Street Journal website, physicist Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, reports on the turmoil in physics created by experiments suggesting that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. If confirmed by other scientists’ experiments around the world, this would have wide-ranging ramifications in the physical sciences, upending key foundations of physics.

Reputations may rise and fall. But in the end, this is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.

The only possible conclusion is that Al-Gore-led charlatans proclaiming man-made-global warming are not engaged in scientific activity.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Troy Davis Execution

People opposed to the death penalty were again in vigorous vocality protesting that the possibility alone of a convict’s innocence is sufficient to forestall execution. In fact they also oppose execution in cases where the evidence of guilt is overwhelming, often corroborated by the perpetrator’s confession.

At the same time, these same people (most of them, at least) have no compunctions about murdering millions of babies each year without even a gesture in the direction of due process of law. Stating it plainly, our society has come to the view that sexual promiscuity is a Constitutional “right” that trumps the God-given natural impulse of women to nurture their infants.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Today’s Liberal-Progressive Hypocrisy

Liberal-progressives are distressed by the Senate and House Republican leadership’s “unprecedented” sending a letter to the Fed Board requesting that the Fed not pursue a new monetary round of debasing the dollar with excess fiat money creation.

This on the heels of Congressman Barney Frank’s recent demand that the law be changed to prevent more conservative regional Federal Reserve banks’ officials from participating in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC is the body that determines the Fed’s monetary policy. Congressman Frank stated that the presence of their dissenting votes has become a “significant constraint” on the Fed’s freedom [to continue debasing the dollar]. In the liberal-progressive lexicon, any discussion or questioning of socialistic policies can only be characterized as vicious obstruction.

The Republican leadership’s letter should probably be seen as no more than a counter to Congressman Frank’s attack, but the so-called mainstream media are color blind to anything other than socialist red.

Mr. Obama, Can You Spare a Dime

All of Obama’s supposed programs to jump start the economy and to revive employment have hammered down private business, the one and only source of real economic revival. It’s obvious that his aim is really the socialist-gospel push to wipe out capitalistic individualism and to make everybody a government employee, under the regulatory control of a self-appointed intellectual elite.

How else to explain his relentless obsession with “the rich” that, in this instance, blinds him to the damage he will do to the poor?